Want a cookie? Play Tetris instead

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Playing a game of Tetris can
reduce the strength of food and nicotine cravings, according to
a new study.

"Craving is a common problem for people trying to quit junk
food, smoking or other drugs," coauthor Jackie Andrade told
Reuters Health in an email.

"It is unpleasant and makes people feel that they have to
wait until the right moment to quit," said Andrade, from
Plymouth University in the UK.

Researchers had used visual games to interrupt cravings
before, but only when they had induced those cravings first, she
said. For this study, people's cravings happened - or did not
happen - naturally.

"Naturally occurring cravings might be harder to disrupt
because they are triggered by internal states like hunger,"
Andrade said. "We chose Tetris because we wanted a task that
would be interesting, demanding and highly visual."

She and her team had 119 college-aged, primarily female,
students describe what, if anything, they were craving, and how
badly. Then they instructed the students to play Tetris for
three minutes.

For half of the students, selected at random, the game
worked fine. For the other half, only a load screen and error
message displayed and they could not play.

Then all of the students filled out the craving
questionnaire again.

Two thirds of them reported craving something at the
beginning of the test: 58 wanted food or a drink, 10 wanted
caffeine and 12 wanted nicotine. The remaining 39 didn't crave
anything initially.

Cravings got weaker over time for everyone. But they
weakened faster and to a greater extent among participants who
played Tetris, the authors wrote in the journal Appetite.

For instance, one tool they used measured craving strength
on a scale from 1 to 100. Among people who reported initially
craving something, the strength of those cravings fell from 59
to 45 for Tetris players, on average, and from 58 to 55 in the
comparison group.

Researchers think this works because concentrating on the
various Tetris shapes distracts the brain from picturing food,
or whatever else a person wants.

"When we want something really badly, it is hard to think
about anything else - and the experience is a very sensory one,"
said David Kavanagh, from the Queensland University of
Technology in Brisbane, Australia. "It engages our imagination."

"That can be a real torture," he said. "But it also gives us
a hint about how we can deal with cravings: if we can do
something that engages the same brain functions, we can blunt
the craving, and make it easier to resist the temptation."

Kavanagh was not involved in the new study but has done
similar research.

Any visual or multisensory activity might have the same
effect as Tetris, Andrade said. She found in an earlier study
that making shapes out of plastic led to a similar outcome.

But the researchers did not measure how long the reduction
in cravings lasted, and it might not be very long, she said.

However, people trying to lose weight could try
incorporating Tetris into their lives, Andrade said.

Lotte van Dillen, from the Leiden Institute for Brain and
Cognition at Leiden University in the Netherlands, agreed.

"I think it is important that people are motivated to play
the game for it to be an effective tool to fight cravings," van
Dillen, who was not involved in the research, told Reuters
Health. "And as a positive side effect you may actually become a
very skillful player."

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1kL65wn Appetite, online February 18,
2014.

advertisement

NOTE: All comments for this article are moderated.
Your comment will be published pending approval.